The Megyn Kelly Show - New Trump Derangement Syndrome Examples, and How CNN Smeared a Navy Veteran, with Piers Morgan, Zachary Young, and Vel Freedman | Ep. 991

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

Megyn Kelly is joined by Piers Morgan, host of "Piers Morgan Uncensored," to talk about his decision to take his digital show independent and start his own media business, how young people are driving massive changes in how media is consumed, the significance of ABC News agreeing to pay millions to settle a Trump defamation lawsuit, CNN settling their defamation case after being found guilty, the BS Russia collusion hoax and whether Trump should consider suing news organizations over it, examples of Trump Derangement Syndrome in the media already in the new presidency, the way American culture has completely moved on from that philosophy, the bombshell new Vanity Fair cover story unloading on Meghan Markle and Prince Harry for their failures at Spotify and Netflix, the truth about how they treat people, and more. Then Zachary Young and his lawyer Vel Freedman join to talk about the defamatory report about Young that CNN aired that they were forced to pay tens of millions for last week, what they were really saying behind-the-scenes, how the report negatively affected Young's life, how CNN knew there were problems with their report on Young before it aired, the arrogance of CNN and their correspondent Alexander Marquardt, and more.Morgan- https://www.youtube.com/@PiersMorganUncensoredFreedman- https://www.fnf.law/attorneys/velvel-freedmanKars 4 Kids: Donate online today at https://Kars4Kids.org/MKHungryroot: https://Hungryroot.com/MK | Get 40% off your first box PLUS a free item in every box for life!  Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Friday. What a week. What a week I'm having, but in a good way. Especially busy for President Donald Trump, who got right to work after taking office on Monday, as we've been discussing. Yesterday, he signed another flurry of executive orders, including one that got all of social media talking to declassify all remaining documents related to the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr. Can you believe we haven't yet released those? I mean, this happened in 63 and 68 before I was born, before a lot of us listening to this were born. They're still being kept a secret by the, I mean, it's like, it's long overdue. It's kind

of ridiculous that we're even having to beg for these things. Plus a vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as Department of Defense Secretary is expected to happen late tonight. And it's going to be a close one. And the Democrats are still slinging mud up until the 11th hour as we got to look at the Republicans who are likely to vote against the nomination. I also want to tell you that later in the show, I'm going to be joined by Zachary Young. Who is Zachary Young? Well, first, this is his first long-form interview, and he is the military veteran who just successfully sued CNN for defamation, winning a $5 million compensatory damages award from them. And they were about to move on to the punitive damages phase where they were recommending the experts something like $120 million, at which point CNN settled this case. So this will be his first long-form interview, and I'm looking forward to discussing with him what it is CNN did to him and why they were so

unapologetic. The jury saw it differently. Okay, but here to kick us off today is Piers Morgan. He's the host of Piers Morgan Uncensored on YouTube, which is now available on all podcast platforms as well. And he's now going fully independent. Selling a car privately can be a real headache, endless negotiations and paperwork hassles, but there is a better way to get your unused car off your hands. For 30 years, Cars for Kids, that's cars with a K, has perfected the car donation process to make it truly effortless. They will take your car in any condition, running or not, and turn it into funds for kids in need, plus a tax deduction for you. It takes just two minutes on the phone or at

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That's with the numeral four, carsforkids.org slash MK to donate your car today. Piers, welcome back to the show. How are you? Megan, great to see you. I'm extremely well, thank you. Megan, great to see you. I'm extremely well, thank you. It's great to see you too. So just as a practical matter, I'm curious because I knew you broke away and you did the YouTube thing, but does this mean you're not working with Rupert anymore or what does this mean? Well, what it means is I have basically acquired my YouTube channel. So I had a three-year deal with Rupert

Murdoch and News and I had a very good chat with him about what I wanted to do. I didn't want to be just a talent for hire anymore when it came to the deal being renewed. It made me a very generous offer, which I said, look, it's very generous. I'm really appreciative, but I actually want to own my own business. And like you, I think we've both worked out that the future is not traditional linear television or traditional newspapers or any of the kind of legacy media, for want of a better phrase. Anyone under 40 is now consuming almost all of their news, opinion and comment from shows like mine, shows like yours and you know individuals who are creating their own kind of media entities and using youtube as the main platform to do that

and i think that this is the future and i've got three sons 31 27 24 they don't watch conventional television they get all their social media and in particular uh via youtube channels like like yours and mine so So I think it was a logical thing to do. I don't even think it's a risk. We've done the hard yards, you and I, I think in building our personal brands. And people, I think, like to hear what we have to say. They like the interviews we do. They like the debates we put on. And this is absolutely, to me, the future. And I think more and more people will take the leap and come with us on what is a pretty exciting journey. I totally agree with you. And one thing that's great about

YouTube and this other format is people can consume it the way they want. If they want to watch the whole show, they can watch the whole show. If they prefer to just watch sort of the hot clips or the things that interest them that were in the show, it's so easy for them to do it. It's just such a, it a, it caters to the, what is the desired user experience so much better. Yeah. And I would add to that, that they can watch it when they want to, you know, the younger generation do not want to be beholden to conventional schedules. You know, when I first started doing my show, I was doing it on YouTube, but also on a linear platform called Talk TV in the UK, which didn't last very long because it wasn't the kind of appetite for it that

Americans have for cable newsletter night. And that was fine because I could see that the numbers on the YouTube version were going through the roof. And that was completely unencumbered by any kind of artificial schedule. You know, before I was trotting into a television studio at 8pm every night here in London, and there were advertising breaks and there'd be an hour, so maybe you get 47 minutes of airtime all broken up. And you're like, why are we doing it like this? Why don't we just forget about the linear thing? Most of our audience actually don't want it. They're all gravitating to a YouTube version of what we're doing here, which doesn't have any ad breaks in real time. We can go as long as we want. And people can watch it whenever they feel like. And that has been, I think, the absolute eye opener, not just for me,

but for a lot of people in the industry. So with the recent election in America, the more people watch the election night on YouTube and watch it on cable and broadcast. And the latest numbers I saw as well a few days ago said that I think it's about 11.5%, 12% now of American television watchers watch television on their smart TV through the YouTube app. That's an amazing statistic. And that means at this rate, I think the cable number is about 18%. The network number is about 23, 24. That means that very soon, probably in two years maximum, YouTube will be the number one way that most people watch television. They'll be watching it through the YouTube app on their smart TV.

It's a revolution that's happening actually very quickly. It reminds me of music, you know, when it went from vinyl to digital, Everyone thought it would take years. Actually, when it happened, the revolution came very quickly. And you're seeing the same with newspapers. I used to be a newspaper editor for many years in the UK. Print versions of newspapers are basically dying out very quickly. The digital versions will survive for those who work out a good digital strategy. But this is all because young people, they live in a digital world, as you know.

So many people have told me that they watch this show on their TV via YouTube. Like they just, you know, we all have the YouTube app. We have the Netflix app, whatever. You just go to the YouTube app and you watch it like you watch a regular television. They don't really even see a difference between linear television and the YouTube options now, except in content and presentation and who's there, you know, because you can do a lot more and say a lot more and approach it very differently and more authentically on YouTube than you can if you were on conventional television, which is why, I mean, not for nothing, but didn't you think it was so weird that dr phil decided to buy a linear tv channel to launch i'm

like i love dr phil but what what is he doing right and it's i don't think it's doing very well and he's now starting to toy with having more of a presence in the digital lane but it's just that whole oprah model is dead it's yesteryear iyear. It's like playing with lanterns when we have electricity. Why would you do it? Well, the interesting thing, I think, is it's a generational thing. I mean, the average age now of cable newswatchers in America is 70, which means a lot of their regular viewers are 80 or 90. If you think about it, that's the average age. It's a similar dynamic, I think, with people who buy print newspapers. So, you know, the print newspapers in America that have done quite well, mainly thanks to Donald Trump, actually. But if you look at, say, the New York Times business model, the reason they've managed to survive and thrive when others have really struggled is because of their digital strategy, which, again, was fueled almost exclusively by that first four years of Donald Trump's term in office. So I think that everyone's working out what their future game is going to be. was fueled almost exclusively by that first four years of Donald Trump's term in office.

So I think that everyone's working out what their future game is going to be. But if you're not in the digital space now in the media, then you are, frankly, a bit of a dinosaur. And you've got to wake up. You asked me at the start whether I'm still working with Rupert Murdoch. He absolutely gets this. And, in fact, news are retaining a slice of the advertising revenue for the next four years on my YouTube channel. And I'll continue to appear when I come to the States on Fox or the shows there, The Five and so on, which I love doing. But they understood that, you know, I believe, rather like you do, I think, you know, when you've built up a YouTube channel

that has, you know, both of us have over 3 million subscribers now. This puts us in the top five or six people in the world right now who are in the news opinion debate space and we're on YouTube. And, you know, I'm sure that you would have similar numbers to these, but I've done some interviews. I did a guy called Bassem Youssef, who's the Egyptian version of Jon Stewart. He was the biggest star on Arabic TV. And he came on my show just after the Israel-Hamas war started. 23 million people watched that interview on my YouTube channel. I then did him again in Los Angeles, a much longer, more thoughtful interview. And another 12 million watched it there. Similarly, I did an interview with the real life stalker from the Baby Reindeer saga. That was amazing. Incredible story. Yeah, and the only interview she's ever given Fiona Harvey,

and she made some extremely damning claims about Netflix and about the reality and said, look, you know, in the series, which has now been decorated with a string of awards, you might have noticed in the last few weeks, in the actual reality, she never went even to court, let alone be convicted of any crime of stalking. So it'd be really interesting whether it carries on winning awards, but ultimately Netflix have to give this lady a massive check for a pretty serious defamation. So that one got another 16 million viewers on our YouTube channel. But interestingly, as you know, it's not just about the YouTube channel. It's about X.

It's about Facebook. It's about TikTok. We have one clip on TikTok from that interview, which has now been watched 36 million times. It was a clip of me asking her, were you in love with it, with Richard Gad, who's played himself in the series and is the supposed victim of her stalking, even though she never got committed to a crime. So I think the point I'm making is you would never get those kind of numbers for

interviews on conventional television. Those days are long gone. You used to in the great old days when television was the only medium and there was no internet, you would get stratospherically big numbers. Michael Jackson interview, I remember getting 40, 50 million. Those days are gone. You will not get that on anything on conventional television. But on YouTube now, you can see these seriously big numbers. It's fascinating. And it's so fun. And we're so lucky to be over here. It's just fun, right? You and I, I think we wake up and we're not, we're not now beholden to any bosses. We can pretty much do whatever we like. There's a wonderful freedom about it. It is fun. And you can basically talk about whatever you want to talk about. And if people like you as a personality, or even if they like to dislike you,

but they find you compelling, whether it's me, you or Tucker, or whoever it may be, who's out there doing this, they at least have total freedom themselves to watch us when they feel like it, in the way they feel like it. They can watch us on their phone, on their laptop, whatever they want. It's a whole new world. And it's being driven by young people who I think have an even greater desire and thirst for information and news, but they're not going to get it off conventional media. Well, I think the names you mentioned, you and Tucker and I were never meant to be constrained. You know, it was just that was never going to hold. It didn't hold in any of our cases. We all got booted from different organizations for just being too outspoken. And so it, I feel like it's landed

where it should. And thank God this ecosystem rose up and I think was in part developed at least in the news lane, not originally, but in the news lane by folks like us. And thank God, right? Necessity is the mother of all invention. Something you mentioned about CNN, I wanted to ask you about, as I mentioned the the intro, in the second hour, we're going to have on the guy who just successfully sued CNN for defamation and won big. And one of the things I saw in the packet as I was preparing for that interview is they appear to have a much lower bar for what can make it onto their air than they do for what can make it onto cnn.com, like their digital website. The defamation standard is the same. He has to prove the same,

whether he's been defamed by an anchor or a producer writing for the website. But I was kind of shocked at how lazy and lackluster CNN apparently is about what goes out on what most people know CNN for, which is its airwaves, all this internal correspondence, which we'll get to on how it's like, eh, it's very sloppy. It's full of holes, but like, yeah, it's fine for CNN. We just can't put it on digital. What do you make of that? I mean, you used to work at CNN, but what do you make of that? Yeah, I think it's a very interesting point. I mean, what is, I think, probably a bigger picture interest to me is this follows the big payout by Joel Stephanopoulos and ABC to Donald Trump, which was $15 million or

whatever it was. You're beginning to see quite big payouts for people who've said things on air on on cable news and now being held to proper account for it many people think that's long overdue so i think that you're people are probably having a very nervous time now in cable news the days are just saying whatever you feel like uh with no accountability for it they're long gone and I think that you're now seeing people on the receiving end going on the attack legally and exercising their rights to say, no, this is wrong. You've defamed me. And by the way, if you do that, you're going to pay a lot of

money. And they're all running scared. They're all settling. You know, the CNN went to court to defend itself. But the moment it got to punitive damages, they bailed because they knew it might be really high, that figure. ABC bailed in a way that I think horrified a lot of their staff, but actually quite rightly, because George Epinov has repeatedly in that interview, repeatedly defamed Donald Trump and repeatedly said that he'd been convicted of a crime he hadn't been convicted of. And if you're going to do that, I'm sorry, it doesn't matter who you are. You know, if you and I did that on our platform, we would also be susceptible to people suing us for defamation. There shouldn't be some sort of loftier than that rule that just because you work

for one of the legacy media, you work to different rules. So I think the worm is changing very quickly here. And people are being held, it would have been really interesting in the Russia collusion mayhem of the first two years of Trump's term in office. If he decided to go after all those networks and all those journalists who perpetuated what turned out to be a complete myth for two years, A, he would have ended up extremely rich

and B, it might have nipped it in the butt because at the time, a lot of us were saying, you were saying, I was saying that this is ridiculous. There is no actual hard evidence to support this. And yet it's dominating the news agenda now for years, and turned out to be a nothing burger of monumental proportions, but a nothing burger that caused Donald Trump a lot of damage. And, you know, it would have been really interesting if he'd sued at the time about that stuff, because it did turn out to be nonsense. And he knew it was nonsense because he was the one that was being accused of it. I know there's been absolutely no proof of it.

You've got just this week, well, last week before the inauguration, AOC saying, I'm not going to the inauguration because I don't support rapists. That is a defamatory statement. She didn't make clear that's opinion. She said it as though it were a matter of fact. It isn't. And I really think he should give some serious thought to suing her. She wasn't on the legislative floor. She was sitting in her apartment doing a little Instagram. You can't get away with that. You can't a term like he's a rapist or he's committing potential treason in working with the Russians, like news organizations have just, and politicians for that matter, given up all the guardrails that we used to observe. You know, we used to at least try to be more careful. I still try to be careful. I'm certainly never trying to be reckless out here. I'm

very relentlessly fact-based and not to say we're always perfect. But, you know, if you make a mistake, you clean it up and you do it transparently. I've seen you do that, too. There is an irresponsibility that's taken hold of certain of our news organizations when it comes to Trump and politicians, too. It's no accident. It's usually about him, Pierce. That is really kind of unprecedented. Yeah, it is.

And you're completely right about AOC. She brazenly repeated in a private capacity, as you say, not on the floor of the house or anything like that. She did it in her own home to the world on her account. She put it out there, repeating the exact same defamation that George Seppalopoulos had said on air that cost ABC $15 million.

So if you're going to be that brazen, you know, think about what a judge or a courtroom would make of that. They'd say, well, you could hardly pretend you didn't know. This has literally been a massive headline grabbing settlement in the last few weeks. And you've decided that it doesn't apply to you, that somehow you are on some superior plane to George Stepanopoulos, which allows you to call Trump a rapist and get away with it. Well, if I was Trump, I'd call her bluff. I'd sue her.

And by the way, he'd win, just like he did with ABC. And so I do think that he needs to have more of his accountability. And people will say, well, what about free speech? It's not about free speech. It's a bit like what I said about the real life alleged stalker from Baby Reindeer. If Netflix is going to put out, I love Netflix, very successful company. I use it all the time, just to be clear. But Netflix is going to broadcast a seven part series, which they say at the start of it, this is a true story. So every time you logged on to watch an episode, this is a true story.

And then you say in that true story that Richard Gad, who's the writer, and he's the guy who plays himself in the series, if you then depict him being forensically stalked by this woman, who then gets convicted and put in prison, and it turns out they claim has already had a previous prison sentence, and none of that is true, then little wonder that she's now taken out a massive lawsuit against Netflix. But why would Netflix do that? You know, why would you call it a true story without, A, doing the due diligence of whether actually this was true,

or B, worse, you know it's true but you don't care and there's a little bit of that about donald trump isn't there well a lot of that about donald trump which is i think a lot of journalists feel they can say whatever they like about him and that's fine i think what he did with the stefanopoulos case is put a line in the sand and say right if you guys are going to defame me on fact, and you mentioned earlier, you try and stick to facts. You're a lawyer by background. I'm a newspaper editor by background. We know how important facts are. It's not to say we've always been faultless ourselves, but it's to say we understand the importance of veracity. We don't come from the Meghan Markle, my truth school of focus. We come from the facts are actual facts.

Now you can then you take a fact, you can then comment as you wish about it, you can interpret a fact any way you like, you can be as opinionated as you want. Right, but what you can't do is do that about something which isn't true, because then you're just defaming people. And A, there's no point in that, because you lose trust with your viewers if you keep doing that. If they know you're saying one thing, but actually it's not true and you repeat that,

I think you're pretty dead in the water as a broadcaster who's been taken seriously by anybody. But B, why do it? In AOC's case, she's done that deliberately. She's almost taunting Trump. Come and sue me. And if I were him, he probably hasn't got time or the information, but if I was him, I would.

I'd call her bluff. Call her bluff. Exactly. All she had to do was say alleged. I mean, she would have been covered if she had said alleged rapist, but she didn't want to because it wasn't as powerful. It didn't sound as despicable. And so she really put herself

out there on a limb. On the Netflix front, they continue to do this. And I feel exactly as you said, I watch Netflix all the time. I enjoy Netflix. I don't agree with the politics of the guy who owns Netflix, but they continue to do this to people. And it's really wrong. They say it's a true story and they lead you to believe. And like you point out in Baby Reindeer, they had the actual guy to whom this allegedly happened as the star. So you believe he's telling it's like, oh, it must be true. It's a firsthand account. And then they also did this long thing on the Central Park Five and the prosecutor, Linda Fairstein, whose reputation they absolutely ruined with this.

And her critics have tried to ruin her over and over and over. And they put on, thanks to Ava DuVernay, the celebrated leftist director, a bunch of things about Linda that weren't true, that were made up. And they were forced to admit it when she sued them. So that's been an ongoing litigation, or it was for a while now. She actually wound up on my husband Doug's podcast, which he does about books. It's called Dedicated with Doug Brunt. And Linda Fairstein talked a little bit about this, where she really hasn't at all. In 2019, Netflix did this docu-series called When They See Us by Anna DuVernay about the Center Park Five, which is an event from the 80s.

And you were at the DA's office at that time. And they attributed words and actions to you that you say and didn't – neither said nor did. Correct. And so you sued. Yes, for defamation. Sued for defamation. Sued for defamation. The judge looking into this went to DuVernay and said, well, where's your source material for these scenes where Linda said and did these things? Her response was, well, it's not a documentary. It settled, and the settlement required Netflix to pay a million dollars to the Innocence Project, and they had to change the messaging when you stream this.

Up front, the messaging now says inspired by and fictionalized, you know, events are fictionalized here. Because DuVernay admitted, actually, that she invented, invented is the She, being Fairstein, really do those things? And no, I invented it because I figured that's what she would be like. Somebody who never met me. So what was her inspiration for the invention? How did she even get onto your name? She just decided this is the character I'm going to have represent these. I can't tell you because I don't know her, but I would think because I was the visible person,

I was the known name as a bestselling author and the other characters who really worked on the case weren't known to anybody. And it was just a good way to take a shot at me. In any event, it's wrong. Netflix, people are watching this thing at home without, you know, they're not like in forensic examination mode. They're taking in entertainment and accepting that if they're told the true story, that's what it is. It's really irresponsible. Well, it is when you're, when you're, you've got a woman involved who, look, for what it's worth, I, having interviewed her, I think she's a pretty unpleasant troll. I heard from other people who've been on the receiving end of her trolling that it can be pretty unpleasant. Do you mean Linda Fairstein or Baby Reindeer Lady?

Oh, I was going to say, because I love Linda Fairstein. I don't even know Linda Fairstein. But no, Fiona Harvey, who was the alleged stalker in the Baby Reindeer series, the real-life woman behind that, you know, in her case, she was leading a normal life. Now, she's not, you know, like I say, she could be a pretty unpleasant troll. I know people have been on the receiving end. But that doesn't make you a criminal stalker.

And there's a big difference between the two things. And the moment that the Netflix story drama dropped on, I say drama, they didn't bill it as a drama, they billed it as a true story. But the moment it was a dramatized, supposedly factual account of what had happened, but the moment it dropped, she was identified almost immediately

because they literally used- Oh, it was easy. A little bit of phraseology from her then tweets, now posts on X. They used the exact wording of her posts in the series. So people just tapped them into Twitter, as it was at the time. My hairstylist, who's an amateur crime solver, had it within two minutes. Within two minutes. So they immediately realized it was this woman, Fiona Harvey.

Her life then becomes completely turned upside down and destroyed to the extent she couldn't leave her house because people were bombarding her with hate, turning up on her doorstep, calling her, shouting abuse at her and so on because they believe the version of events in the series. Now, like I say, she's not a particularly... She's not someone you warm to or you feel particularly sorry for because I've seen the stuff she's said to people and it's pretty unpleasant.

But I would categorise it like I would a troll on Twitter, on X, right? It's that kind of stuff. That does not make you a criminal. And she has not, to anyone's proof so far, passed the bar of criminality. And yet in the series, like I said, they don't only say at the end, he gets charged and convicted of stalking Richard Gagg. They also throw in for good measure that she had a previous conviction for stalking somebody else. Now, I interviewed the person that was supposedly part of that story. And she's a lawyer from Scotland

who confirmed that actually, no, she never got convicted of stalking her. There was a warning letter from police, but again, a very different thing. So I was able to- You've got to be careful with criminal convictions. Wait, can I ask you a quick question about her? Because I'm always afraid to interview anybody who's been accused of stalking or convicted of stalking, which I realize is not her case, because I don't want to pick them up. You know, like they have this weird gravitational pull. And if you spend time with a stalker, especially as a public figure, Pierce, you're you're waving the red flag to the bull. Did you have any concern about that? I did. But funny enough, I never heard anything from her. And so people, people kept saying to me,

I hope you didn't give her your phone number but I used to joke and say no I gave her Don Lemon's just to annoy him which is not true obviously but but it was uh you know I mean I never heard another word from her and she had ways of probably getting communication to me so that but that what that told me it's very interesting you asked that question because what it told me was that she probably is not a stalker. Stalkers don't behave like that. Stalkers never give up. In her case, both with Richard Gad and the previous person she was accused of harassing, the moment the police got involved at all, she stopped. Now, stalkers don't stop.

No, they don't. A very good friend of mine is a top broadcaster in the UK. He's had a stalker for 25 years, and it's been relentless, despite this person going to prison several times for stalking her. And real stalkers are so demented, they never stop their obsession. So that's why I really don't believe she's one of those. Not only is she not a convicted stalker, I don't think she behaves like an actual stalker. That doesn't mean to say she's squeaky clean or a particularly nice person,

but you cannot build a whole hugely successful, very profitable Netflix series that you call a true story by telling the viewers who are watching, this woman is a convicted criminal. If she's not, if you do, that is a serious defamation. That's what we call defamation per se, where you don't even have to prove damages. The court will presume them if you say somebody's a convicted felon and they're not. All right. Well, that whole thing is fascinating. I was very into that Baby Reindeer series and I learned a lot. I couldn't, I thought the interview with her was riveting peers. Um, while we're on the subject

of the media, there is in the news today, cause we're kind of talking about the Trump derangement syndrome in the media too, is a confession by someone at the intercept, which is the news organization that Glenn Greenwald helped found, you know, it's on the left and it had a certain POV. And then it just went so crazy that Glenn left it in a blaze of glory, but it continues on. And there's a guy there named Jim Risen, who Glenn says they, they hired just to be sort of a counterpoint to some of what Glenn was saying. Glenn always thought the Russiagate stuff was nonsense. So they bring this guy on to say, Oh, Russiagate, Russia. No, it's real. It's real. It's real. And he's got TDS, Trump derangement syndrome. So he goes on the Intercept

Briefing podcast. And I swear, I think he speaks for so many journalists in and around D.C. Take a listen to SOT7. Are you more concerned about what's happening? Is this what you expected? I've actually been so depressed since the election that I've been trying to avoid, ignore the news as much as possible. But that's pretty impossible, really, to ignore it completely. And I think it's going to be as bad as I anticipated, maybe worse. Trump has appointed a bunch of lunatics and conspiracy theorists to positions of power, and he's turned the government over to oligarchs. And so I don't think it's going to—I think it's going to get bad really, really fast.

But I'm trying to, as I said, trying my best to watch sports. Okay. On top of that, I hear on the New York Times' podcast, The Daily, this morning that Trump, in revoking the security clearances of people like John Bolton, is intentionally sending a message to Iran that they should kill him. So the media is not handling it well, Pierce. They are not coping with his reelection and inauguration very well. Well, you're missing my favorite of all, which I'm sure you've discussed at length this week, the Elon Musk supposed Nazi salute. Because the thing is that at some stage, the Democrats, liberals, whoever you want to call them,

the woke left, at some stage will turn everything back to Hitler and Nazis, which is their obsession. Everybody knows that Elon Musk is not a Nazi and doesn't want to support the Nazi party and despises Hitler like the rest of us decent folk. They all know that. And yet they've managed to take his signal, which, as he's explained, in the moment and afterwards was from my heart to you. And all right. As I said in my post on X, it was probably ill-advised to do it the way he did it because I knew what would happen. But that doesn't change the fact that it was all bullshit and that obviously he wasn't doing a Nazi salute. And yet the left could not stop themselves from reverting back to the same playbook that cost Hillary Clinton her election campaign in 2016.

It cost Biden, or Kamala Harris, as it turned out, but Biden before that, and then Harris, this one as well. Because the reality is, the moment you start using Hitler and the Nazis about Trump or his supporters, you're just telling most right-minded people that you have lost your mind and that your Trump derangement syndrome is so advanced and so pathetic that you would genuinely equate people who support a guy like Trump, who has never ordered the Holocaust of anybody and isn't going to, let alone murder 6 million Jews and 12 million people. In fact,

he's an anti-war president, which for a Republican is pretty unprecedented in modern history. Somebody wants to end wars, not stop them. And yet they compare him to one of the worst genocidal maniacs in the history of the planet, and that anyone who supports him is a fascist, a Nazi, and so on. And, you know, you would have thought they'd learned their lesson, Megan, by what happened in the election, that when you get a shellacking that big, and people from every single ethnic group, you know, whether it was, you know, blacks, whites, Latinos, whether it was Jews, Muslims, you name it, women, men, old, young, everyone gravitated to Trump in bigger numbers. Because as he put it in his victory speech, they understood that underpinning

what he's about is a core of common sense. The Democrats have lost an ability to understand what common sense is. They sound nuts. And whether it's them trying to persuade us that biological men should compete in women's sport, because of course they should, when the rest of us all know it's utterly insane and grotesquely unfair, or whether it's saying that Trump and his supporters are a bunch of Nazis, whatever it is, it sounds like the ideology and thinking of a lunatic. And that guy- Not to mention that, just think about the weird articles we've seen over the past year or two about how men can chest feed, showing the torture of these little babies trying to get milk out of a man's breast. Ridiculous. Of course they can't. Of course they can't.

This is what I hate most about it, is that the gender specific language has been eradicated at the altar of far left wokeism to the extent where, just a little example, but it really annoys me. I always fly with British Airways, wonderful airline, fly the flag for my country. I love it. And I usually fly to America on it and have a great time. But they used to always say, I used to love this, a soothing accent would come on from the pilot. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I will be flying your plane today. I'm Captain. So it sounded, well, obviously the British accent, as you know, Megan, always sounds so sophisticated. And it's always charming

and erudite, all those lovely things. But never mind that. It was a fact that he would greet ladies and gentlemen. That used to be fine. That used to be something which was perfectly normal, because the vast majority of human beings are ladies or gentlemen and identify as such. But now they're not allowed to do it. Now there's been an edict put out that they cannot be specific about gender. They can't say ladies and gentlemen, because there might be somebody sitting at the back who's offended because they don't identify as a lady or gentleman. To which I say, what about my right and the vast majority of passengers' right who want to be identified as lady and gentleman?

What happens to our rights to be identified how we want to be identified? What has happened in the last few years is that a small minority of people have been catered for to such a ridiculous degree that all language has had to be changed to accommodate them, even if the vast majority of people want the language to stay the same. Trump is ending that quickly. And I'm so glad to see it, because actually, it's been one of the worst things about wokeism is this gender neutrality coming into every aspect of life. And the pretense that somehow people who give birth are not women and mothers. People who breastfeed are not women and mothers.

Men don't breastfeed. That's it. End. Yes. We're just uterus havers. There is something in the news about the UK and school children. The UK has been just as bad on the trans stuff as the United States. And they had the whole Tavistock clinic, which thankfully closed where they were transing

kids. And it's still going on. They don't, they need an edict like the Donald Trump executive order, but at least they've seen the light on the puberty blockers and the cross-sex hormones, which we have not, even though the vast majority of Americans now oppose puberty blockers and the cross-sex hormones, which we have not, even though the vast majority of Americans now oppose puberty blockers for kids, according to the latest polls. But we're behind the UK when it comes to that. But here's something that was in the news I want to ask you about.

UK schoolchildren now, schoolchildren, are about to be shown this documentary about this so-called trans teenager. And it's about a teenage girl who's, quote, transitioning into male, which is not possible, using a breast binder and starting testosterone. It's going to show in classrooms in the UK in February

to promote LGBTQ History Month, and it's funded by the National Lottery. Here is a clip. Stand by. This is you in four years time. Yes, this is how you sound. I think back to you often. I remember you, the bully teenager who didn't think you'd make it to 16. And I know you're thinking that right now.

Well, I'm here to tell you that you made it. Well, I'm going to say exactly what you're thinking right now. You're a boy. And on the 21st of December 2017, you started testosterone and changes started happening. Very soon your family realised that this is in four years time, you will have a hairy stomach, a deeper voice, a slightly more defined jawline, broader shoulders, a different name. You've had partners who appreciate you as you are. You've done three standup gigs. You've traveled the country telling people your story and showing them the great man you've become. You are the happiest you've ever been. This is unbelievable.

They're bringing this into classrooms there, Piers. It's ridiculous. And can you imagine if you did a heterosexual version of that, the outrage that would be erupting from the LGBTQ plus community, that they were being offended and insulted in this way by having a straight version of that in classrooms. So there's an absolute hypocrisy here as well. But never mind all that. None of this stuff should be in classrooms. You know, we learned nothing.

Keep this stuff away from classrooms, you know, because apart from anything else, what you end up with, you know, I'll tell you one little story about a school in the south of England, which I happen to know quite well. And they've got a thousand pupils. And when the gender fluid craze was sweeping through the world, and particularly in Britain, but also America as well, 98 pupils, I was told, out of a thousand, began identifying as gender fluid. Now, when I heard that, what was quite obvious to me was two things. One, they didn't know what they were really doing. And secondly, that if you ask the question today, how many of them are still gender fluid, the answer would probably be almost zero, which is, guess what, exactly what's happened. In other words, young kids will pick up

fads and they'll run with them. And David Bowie was a massive rock star in the 70s and was a slightly cross-dressing guy who wore makeup, lots of kids at school began doing the same to emulate their hero. That's what young teens in particular do. But what you mustn't do as a society, I don't believe, and I'm sure you share this view, you don't put this kind of stuff into classrooms to get inside young impressionable minds in some pursuit of what you think you're doing is positive, but actually could have a very discombobulating, confusing effect on these young minds at the same time.

I really just hate it. I've got four kids. I don't want my kids anywhere near this stuff. It's a social contagion and it's one that could lead to sterility, not to mention the numerous problems that overtake you physically when you go on puberty blockers. Forget cross-sex hormones as a young person. Then they parade it out there in a way they would never do with anorexia, with cutting. Can you imagine a video like cutting? If you're stressed out and depressed and anxious, it can really be a relief for you to just take a knife and start slicing your body up. And then in four years, you might feel a whole lot less anxious. You'll have scars all over

your body and you might actually be playing with fire on your life. But I'm telling you, you'll feel less anxious. Look at me covered in scars that this is exactly the same equivalent thing of that. I cannot believe they're putting this in classrooms, but then I can, because we were at a school in New York, a private school where they were celebrating and promoting trans ideology in the third grade, which is one of the reasons why we left. All right, wait, let me shift gears. There's a lot more I want to get to. What do you make of the Trump order declassifying JFK, RFK, and MLK files finally? Yeah, I think it's fantastic and long overdue. And I'm sure it's been driven by RFK Jr., who I've interviewed many times, including talking

to him about this very issue. And this is the guy whose father was assassinated, whose uncle was assassinated, and he's never really got the answers himself. And it is ridiculous that something that happened back in the 60s, both of these assassinations, that there should still be anything held from the American people. The American people have a right to know absolutely everything about their presidents and about their leading politicians. Here you've got two of the most famous and charismatic politicians in American history. And, of course, Martin Luther King as well. So there's three of them.

I'm going to be three of the most pivotal political figures of modern American times. And yet there still remain all sorts of conspiracy theories, all sorts of unanswered questions about all of their deaths. And the best way to try and deal with that, as always, is to be completely transparent and to let everybody see absolutely everything that's in those files and work it out for themselves. The moment you start hiding stuff, the moment you start suppressing the truth from the public, that is what fuels conspiracy theories. Every single time, nailed down. If you let the public know, as they have done for many decades, that we are not showing you some of these files because it might be dangerous for American national security or whatever, it's a load of hogwash.

The reality is there's a duty to be transparent about these things. The American people and the world, frankly, have a right to know. Here's Trump signing the EO and with an interesting closing comment yesterday. Lastly, sir, we have an executive order ordering the declassification of files relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy,

Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Reverend Dr. Martin K. Jr. That's a big one, huh? A lot of people are waiting for this for a long, for years. For decades. And everything will be revealed. Give that to RFK Jr. Yes, sir.

I think it's a great thing. I think it was clearly the right move. It's like, my God, we're generations removed. Let's just have the truth. I don't actually, unfortunately, expect any smoking guns because I don't think these people are dumb enough to put one in writing and keep it in a government file. And if it were already in there, knowing that declassification was very much in the news for the past 10 years, it would have been pulled and destroyed. But still, whatever. Let's take what they have. He also appears yesterday pardoned 23 pro-life protesters. We've seen this in our country. We've seen it in your country. I saw that poor woman who was literally just praying in her head outside of a UK abortion clinic, and she got arrested because the cop was like, what are you doing here? You're standing here. She was like, I'm praying inside my head.

She was, and she got arrested. We've seen the same stuff happen over here. There is, some of the people who are being released are, one was a Holocaust survivor who was protesting quietly outside of an abortion clinic. Here's one, Eva Edel singing with other protesters at a Nashville abortion clinic in 2021. This is not one of the ones that she was indicted in, but you can see that she is sitting in a wheelchair with a purple blanket. Christ, have mercy. Christ, have mercy on it, peers, is I assume they're violating law. I don't actually take the time to look it up, but there is generally a time, place, and manner restriction around abortion clinics that doesn't allow you to go in, doesn't allow you to disrupt the experience for a woman

going in there. Okay, fine. What the police should do is go remove those people. They should get them out and enforce the law in that way. But to actually throw these people in jail and treat them like they're hardened criminals, they gave real jail sentences to so many of these people. And I support the pardon. What do you think? No, I completely agree. I think that my criteria with all these things, and it applies to the January the 6th rioters, protesters, whatever people want to call them, and Trump's pardons. I actually came down with J.D. Vance on that and not Donald Trump. I would not have pardoned the ones who perpetrated acts of violence against the police. And I have the same view of the anti-abortion protesters. If they're protesting peacefully, that is the basic

intrinsic right of every American citizen, to have the right to exercise your right to peacefully protest. And if you've transgressed some little local law about trespass or whatever it may be, fine. As you say, remove them. If they're then violent towards the police who are removing them, then that's a different thing. If they're not, then that's where it should be left. And I just think this, we're seeing a lot of it in the UK, where people are being arrested and charged and sometimes imprisoned for putting comments on Facebook and so on. And my criteria with them is, if they are actually organising violence, and you can see that in what

they're writing, if they are genuinely organising violence or they're perpetrating it, that is one thing. If they're not, they're expressing perhaps very unpleasant views or nasty views, whatever it may be, or they're using language that people don't like. That is not an imprisonable offence to me. That's your free speech right, to be obnoxious, to be unpleasant and all these things. So the dividing line for me always is violence. And it doesn't matter whether you're a BLM rioter, or a January 6th protester, or an anti-abortionist, or whatever it may be. If you cross the line into violence, or you are orchestrating violence or planning it, that is one thing, and you should feel the full force of the law. If you're peacefully protesting, then you should be left alone to peacefully protest. prison, like if you really want to make a point with the 87 year old, uh, Holocaust survivor,

which I mean, truly, this is what we're doing. 89 year old Holocaust survivor. Um, maybe you say you have to do one day of community service now, like you've got to go out there and I don't know what an 89 year old could do in community service, but I'm sure it's something answer phone banks or some charity that I can live with. You know, like I think most people who know they're going to break the law and do this at an abortion clinic are prepared to accept something like that. I think most of them would even take a day in jail, sort of civil disobedience style, but five years in prison for praying? This is ridiculous. So good for Trump on that. And now we must get to the most important news of the day, obviously, when the two of us are together, and that is Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. But we actually do need to talk about the

fact that Vanity Fair has turned on them, Piers. Vanity Fair, with a hit piece on her in particular, writing all about how she's a diva, which some of us have known and have been talking about, and how people can't handle working for her. Okay, I want to get the quote. Let's see. Stand by. Okay. Two sources say a colleague with ties to archetypes, her podcast, took a leave of absence after working on three episodes, then left Gimlet, the podcast producer, altogether. Several others described taking extended breaks from work to escape scrutiny, meaning from her, exiting their job or undergoing long-term therapy after working with Megan. The person who interacted professionally with her says, I think if Megan acknowledged her own shortcomings or personal contributions to situations rather than staying

trapped in a victim narrative. Her perception might be better. And going on to say the prince and the starlet, according to Vanity Fair, have become local villains in Montecito. Quoting someone is saying they are the most entitled, disingenuous people on the planet. They moved from England to get away from the scrutiny of the press, supposedly. And all they do is try to get in the press in the United States. So what does all this tell us? What it tells us is, rather comically, that when you have this couple who, remember, on their website, it says that they're all about compassion.

They're compassionate people. They're compassionate people. They're also all about mental health and helping people with mental health. They've been very vocal about that recently, about the perils of online trolling and the effect it has on people's mental health. And yet here we are with Vanity Fair, the Hollywood Bible, the thing that Meghan was most thrilled about getting the cover of a few years ago when she got engaged to Harry, which went down very badly with the palace at the time, I can tell you. But now it reveals actually she in particular is a nasty little bully who sends staff into therapy. Think about that for a moment. This also follows all the stories about her bullying staff over here in the UK, which is unresolved. NDAs stopped all that stuff coming

out. But she bullied people in a very unpleasant way over here. So it's no surprise to people who work at Buckingham Palace, they saw and witnessed all this here. So I just showed, look, they're a pair of hypocrites, they're a pair of chancers, as the Spotify guy called them, a pair of effing grifters. And they're desperately trying to maintain some kind of future as a renegade royal couple when they're no longer part of the royal family. The royals don't talk to them. The king does not talk to his own son. None of the senior royals talk to these two. They are total pariahs in the family because the only currency they have is trashing the royal family

and the monarchy. And every time they try and do something else, nobody cares. No one cared about their podcast series. Nobody cared about the polo series recently. Nobody cares about any of it. All they want to hear is the dirt. And these two for five years have reveled and wallowed in royal dirt for vast amounts of money. And that's what makes Prince Harry's ongoing campaign against the UK newspapers, which had another flare up this week, so laughably hypocritical, because he talks about intrusion into royal privacy. And yet, if you ask any senior member of the royal family, who has invaded your privacy the worst? It's Prince Harry. It's the guy who gave the inside track for money to Oprah, to Netflix, to his publishers, to anyone who would pay top dollar. This guy invaded the privacy of his family. And yet he has the goal to present himself as some great standard bearer of ethics and decency when it comes to royal privacy.

Do me a favor. Right. Sooner or later, everybody turns on them. It seems like just all they need is exposure. All they need is time. She's bullied almost all of her staff out of the job. They all wind up leaking to the press what a horrid nightmare she was to work with. And the other piece in the Vanity Fair article, which was amazing, was about him and how neither one of them showed up with any ideas on what to do. Like, actually, how are we going to earn all this money? And that one of the ideas for the podcast that he had

was that he would get people like Vladimir Putin and Mark Zuckerberg to sit with him. But it wasn't because, because he said, everybody's got damage in their childhood and I had damage in my childhood too. So you're thinking, okay, all right, I guess he's going to use that to bond with them. No. The conclusion was that their experiences had made them into sociopaths, according to Harry. And he wanted to explore how they became sociopaths, but he how they develop sociopathy would be what is referred to in Access Journalism as a booking challenge. They're just so completely deluded. That's the thing that always strikes me. It's utter delusion.

And they're also just shocking hypocrites. Do you remember when they were lecturing us all about carbon footprint and climate change? And then they were using Elton John and George Clooney's private planes like taxi services. They actually, on the day of her half a million dollar baby shower in New York, attended by all the great and good ladies of New York. That was the same day that from their then Twitter account, they lectured the British people about poverty. I mean, you couldn't make it up. And now what's happened, I mean, what's most laughable of all,

in a sort of horrible way, is that she's got this new series where she's trying to be the new Martha Stewart, where she's going to be cooking in her fancy mansion for all her fancy friends, very fancy food. Can you imagine a less appropriate thing in California right now than this fake princess, this duchess trading off the title she got given by an institution she's trying to ruin, actually prancing about in this kitchen in a multi-million dollar mansion with her famous friends in California when 12,000 to 14,000 people have just lost their homes in the most horrendous fires that the city's ever had in Los Angeles

and that the state's ever seen. It is so unbelievably inappropriate that that series could go ahead, but I bet it does. Yeah, they're saying it's actually going to pick up in March now as opposed to the January launch date. I'll tell you, as somebody who's got friends out there, they can't get apartments even to rent. The rental market has tripled. People are taking advantage of this terrible circumstance of their neighbors. You've got to pay a year up front and rent. It's like they're not going to be in a mood for, you know, Megan and her Martha Stewart imitation in March any more so than they are

now. Pierce, always a pleasure. We will see you over on YouTube. Looking forward to it. Great to see you, Megan. Just to say it's available now, Piers Morgan Uncensored in American on all your normal podcast sites. So get watching and feel you. Awesome. Always entertaining and definitely uncensored. It's a pleasure, Pierce. When we come back, as I mentioned, we're going to have this Navy vet who successfully sued CNN for defamation.

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HungryRoot.com slash MK. Code MK. Last week, we told you about the blockbuster defamation verdict against CNN. Jake Tapper's show The Lead in 2021 ran a report by a reporter named Alex Marquardt that accused Navy veteran Zachary Young of exploiting, quote, desperate Afghans by demanding, quote, exorbitant fees and operating in a, quote, black market while offering evacuation services after Joe Biden's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. CNN scrubbed the report from the Internet, but we have it here, which you can watch for yourself. CNN's Alex Marquardt has discovered, Afghans trying to get out of the country face a black market full of promises, demands of exorbitant fees, and no guarantee of safety or success. What is the U.S. doing that you know of to try to get you and your family out?

Unfortunately, they are not doing now anything. Up to 31st, they said everything is closed and it's finished. We did not receive anything back from U.S. Embassy or from any other organization. So he went online, where he found a man named Zachary Young, who is one of many advertising evacuations from Afghanistan, posting just this week, we can deliver. One LinkedIn user posted messages with Young, where Young said it would be $75,000 for a car to Pakistan. He told another it would be $14,500 per person to get to the United Arab

Emirates or Albania for another $4,000. Prices well beyond the reach of most Afghans. We got Young's number and called, but he didn't pick up. In a text message, he told CNN that Afghans trying to leave are expected to have sponsors pay for them. If someone reaches out, we need to understand if they have a sponsor behind them to be able to pay evacuation costs, which Young says are highly volatile and based on environmental realities. Young repeatedly declined to break down the costs or say if he's making money. And the lower third for the listening audience has got the stuff about black market and exorbitant fees.

I mean, it's a fascinating story, except it's not true. Despite what the report and its on-screen chyrons, meaning the lower third on your screen, showed, Young did not operate in a black market. He did not advertise to Afghans. He did not charge exorbitant prices to Afghans. And he did not exploit Afghans. What Young did was save dozens. And if that report were not bad enough, what CNN was doing behind the scenes and what they were saying about this guy Young was even worse. You just saw CNN's Marquardt try to make the phone call to Young. Well, thanks to Discovery in the case, we have the video of him filming his reaction shots

to this. Watch this. Okay. Oh, well. Theater. Theater. Theater. Theater. Not news. Theater's great. I love theater. It's super fun. It's not news. And you don't really generally get sued for doing fake things on stage on Broadway. It's kind of the nature of the business. It's not the nature of our business. This is not the only problem. Texts show this guy Marquardt writing, we gonna nail this Zachary Young MF-er. And other CNN employees calling him a shit,

an a-hole, and a shitbag. This is relevant because in a case like this, you generally have to prove that they behaved with some malice, depending on whether the court finds Mr. Young a public figure. And those would be exactly the kind of texts that would suggest there is some. And take a look at your screen here. Producer Michael Conte said Young had a, quote, punchable face. He was asked about this text in his deposition, and he did not back down. Watch. Yeah. So why do you think that? Probably the smirk in the sunglasses. This is not what you would call a good witness for CNN. It's unbelievable. The jury awarded Zachary Young $5 million in compensatory damages. This just happened. And they were set to give him even more in punitive damages. That's the phase of the

trial that they were about to move on to. They found CNN liable. They gave him $5 million compensatory. And now they were about to debate just how big the punitive damage award would be when Young and CNN entered into a confidential settlement. CNN, for its part, released this statement. We remain proud of our journalists and are 100% committed to strong, fearless, and fair-minded reporting at CNN, though we will, of course, take what useful lessons we can from this case. Zachary Young joins me now, along with his attorney, Val Friedman, here for his first long form interview. Guys, thank you so much for being here. Zachary, thank you for your service. And first, just tell me how you're feeling right now with like about a week to

breathe after this whole thing wrapped up. Well, thanks for having us. It's been a long road the last three years of getting to trial. And then, of course, the two-week trial was quite intense. Just got back to Austria on Saturday. And my wife and I are still trying to decompress and really understand what just happened. So we're definitely very glad that it's over. We're very happy with the outcome. Val, can you just put into perspective how unusual this is to get this kind of defamation award against an organization like CNN? Sure. I mean, we're trying to track down exactly when the last time it happened was, but it seems that a national media organization like CNN has not

been held liable for punitive damages in the past 50 or 60 years. So it's, it's quite rare. And Megan, as you touched on in the beginning, it has to do with what needs to be proven to hold a media company to account like that. Was Zachary deemed a public figure or a limited public figure because, you know, if so, CNN would have more protection. And when we when we report on people who are public figures, you really can't be sued for defamation as news people unless we do it. We commit errors with what's called actual malice. So what was the standard that the court implied here, Val? So they tried, but they failed. So he was not called a public

figure. And so to get liability on the underlying count, meaning for the jury to say you have to pay him your compensatory damages, the $5 million, we only had to show negligence. But in order to get the punitive damages award, you have to show malice. It's the same standard. So when the jury eventually found that CNN should be liable for punitive damages, they had to have found that CNN knew what they were publishing was not true or had at minimum substantial doubts as to whether it was true. They published anyways, despite knowing it was true or probably not true, and that they did it with a primary intent to harm Zachary. And so the jury had to find both those things and did find both those things

in order to hold CNN liable for punitive damages. Wow, wow. Okay, so then that's when you settled the case. And I'll get back to Zach to tell the story in a minute, but I'm just kind of interested in the legalities of it. So I'll stick with you, Val, for a minute. So that's when you settled the case, but you didn't settle it earlier, not because CNN didn't try to settle it. They did try to settle it, but you guys would not settle it. So what was your thinking on that? Because

defamation cases are tough. You know, they are tough. By the time we were forced to attend the court-ordered mediation, CNN asked the court to force Zach to come in from Vienna in person for that meeting. They said they wanted to take it seriously. But I got to tell you, it wasn't really legal strategy. We gave Zach advice. We told him we thought he had a really strong case. The evidence here was overwhelming in our view that cnn had committed defamation had it done so consciously but it was really zach that wouldn't settle he said he had to you know i think he told me there were two things he wanted to accomplish one he needed to clear his name because they had slandered him internationally to millions of people and the second is he thought

this was a very rare opportunity to kind of expose wrongdoing and bad actors in the media and just kind of try to course correct a little bit. And he he's a patriot. He's always been a patriot. He was a Navy vet. He worked for the CIA for a long time. He's not supposed to talk about it, but it came out at trial. And he this was just one more way he was serving his country. He would not say, Zach, I as a news person myself now, I'm not I'm not huge on, you know, suing news people for defamation. Of course, like it's scary there before the grace. But this is so egregious. I mean, I can't imagine a case in which like I've never texted with my producers this way about somebody that we're reporting on, like with such disgust and animus, and then gone out with a report that my internal producers were telling me was quote, full of holes like Swiss cheese and not even worthy to make the website, but they'd let me say it on the air. I'd be scared shitless to actually front a report like that. And then when the person sued me to do anything other than completely fall on my sword and say, oh my God, we got everything

wrong. I'm deeply sorry to Zach. And frankly, I probably would have put you on the air to let you tell me to my face in front of my audience, how wrong I was. That's, that's truly how I would have handled it had I ever been in such a terrible situation. But all you got out of CNN from what I read is, and we'll get, we'll go, we'll do the backstory in a second, was like this generic sort of Pamela Brown sitting in for Jake Tapper, anodyne, milquetoast, correction, and generic, like, we're sorry is that basically all you had prior to filing the lawsuit it is and you know now that i understand more about the legalities i understand why they did it wasn't a sincere correction or apology and in fact when we deposed all of cnn's witnesses more than a dozen, including their corporate rep,

they all retracted their apology. They said that they disagreed with it. They were never consulted about it, the reporters, the editors, the CNN corporate rep, and that it was made for legal reasons by lawyers. So that was pretty disturbing to hear. And it's a position that they maintained all the way up through trial. We gave them opportunities to say something like, we made some mistakes. We could have done better. We could have done more journalism. We could have used different words, but they didn't. They doubled down all the way up until the very end. And for me, I think that was the most disturbing part, was that even faced with this lawsuit and the overwhelming evidence that we had in discovery, they still couldn't say that they made a mistake. And even now, you read the statement that CNN put out after the decision,

they said that they stand behind their brave journalists. They're proud of them. They're proud of it. They're proud of them. And they'll take whatever lessons they can away from this experience. I don't know what that means. But you mentioned, you know, why didn't we settle years ago?

This was very important to me to expose what happened, because if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. And I think that more often than not, this is the way that mainstream media gets away with it. They settle, they sweep it under the rug, and you never know the details. So Vel and I were very transparent from the beginning three years ago that we wanted to take this all the way to the end. And then, of course, we went through the experience with Discovery. And I didn't understand at the beginning how bad it really was. All the internal messages about arranging my funeral, nailing me, the concern from editors saying this story is 80% emotion, 20% obscure fact, full of holes like Swiss cheese. And they talked a lot

about this internal mechanism called triad, this quality control system. And they tried to make a big deal out of it during the trial that, you know, they did this. The story went through that process and they approved it. To me, that doesn't make it better. It makes it worse. So I'm glad about the outcome. I really hope that, you know, it got some visibility. I know that the media didn't want to talk about the case for the first few years, not because they weren't aware of it. But, you know, talking about defamation as a sore, sore subject in American media. They're afraid. But that's right. They're afraid for the reasons I said. But it's like, if you, if you approach your job earnestly and you do your, it's not to say you'll never potentially defame somebody. It's like, when you talk about people for a living,

there's always that risk, but you have to have trust that you're, when your heart's in the right place and you have an honest approach to each of your stories that will rule the day because the defamation bar is high. It's high. So, you know, it's like, if you're quick to correct and you're honest about, did we make a mistake? And do I owe this guy an apology? Did I screw it up? In my experience, you'll be fine. You'll be fine. And by the way, you know, you can times that by a hundred when you're dealing with, you know, a former veteran, a veteran, because it's like there actually is a reputation there to harm. Like you've got to be extra careful. You're talking

about somebody who's served his country honorably. Like you really could, could hurt such a person. I want to, I want to show this, the correction by Pam Brown, uh, which was aired months later, the report I think was November of 21. And then the correction came March of 22. And then that corporate representative, the CNN senior VP, I think, at trial saying everybody on the editorial team disagreed with the correction. Watch these back-to-back, 28 and 29. And before we go, a correction. In November, we ran a story about Afghans desperate to flee the country who face paying high sums beyond the reach of average Afghans. The story included a lead-in and banner throughout the story that referenced a black market.

The use of the term black market in the story was an error. The story included reporting on Zachary Young, a private operator who had been contacted by family members of Afghans trying to flee the country. We did not intend to suggest that Mr. Young participated in a black market. We regret the error. And to Mr. Young, we apologize. Do you recall the Pam Brown apology? Yes. And you testified about it yesterday. Do you recall that? I did. And I believe you said essentially that you did it to try to avoid a lawsuit, right? Yeah. So CNN's not really sorry, right? Here's how I look at it. And I think CNN made a decision based on what Mr. Young and you had brought forward that it would make sense to do this correction.

Editorially, I think you've heard that people don't think that what they did misrepresented anything editorially. And they don't agree with our legal department. Because the legal department was saying you've gotten it wrong. And also the standards department, Vel, looked at the report before it hit air and said that I think they're the ones who said Swiss cheese. I'm just looking at my my notes here. Internal communications at CNN saying, OK, it had approval from Triad, which is senior editors of CNN, whose story vet and their editorial team known as The Row, standards editors and lawyers, and that the internal communication showed that there was CNN employee Alison Hoffman saying this

story was, quote, pretty flawed and we should consider foregoing the right, meaning on CNN.com, and just having the video programmed. CNN employee Tom Lumley texting, quote, my fundamental question is not answered, but on TV it's less of a problem. Dramatic silhouetted interviews and it zipped along, so less glaring. An exchange between this guy, Tom Lumley, and CNN employee Megan Trimble. Lumley, it's an incomplete story in my opinion. Trimble, it is. I can see why it could make a quick hit video. Lumley, it needs more reporting. We don't really know what's going on. Trimble. But it's not fleshed out for digital. Again, here again for the audience, them making a distinction between what they'd show their audience on air and what they'd put

on CNN.com. Lumley explained that, quote, the TV package was watchable because it had interviews with people scared for their families, but the story is full of holes like Swiss cheese. Trimble agreed that, quote, the story is 80% emotion, 20% obscured fact, LOL. Lumley tells senior editor Fuzz Hogan, TV piece was a good watch, but for digital, I have too many outstanding questions. Wow. So, Val, it looks like notwithstanding this strong opinion amongst the standards people, like this is not ready for air, CNN aired it. And if I were to get these CNNers in front of me today, they'd be saying, Megan, we didn't make a mistake. Other than the chyron that said black market and suggesting that Zach was part of that,

we didn't do anything wrong. That's right. I mean, I would say, I think Tom Lumley and Megan Trimble were editors in digital. The triad is their three-part review. It includes legal standards and the row. And they all approved it. Fuzz Hogan, one of the members of triad, is one of the ones that called Zach a shit. So, you know, you're right in that everyone would defend it. We made a point of asking every CNN witness on the stand. Are you sorry? Would you do it again?

Each one of them said, we're not sorry. We would do it again. And that helped with our punitive damages argument, which was you heard, we turned to the jury, we said, you heard, they all said they'd do it again. They all said they're not sorry. Of course, they're going to do it again. I do want to say one thing. I have a lot of respect for Adam Levine, who was the corporate rep you just saw. His documents were super clean. He didn't participate in any of the kind of name calling of Zack or anything like that. And then he became CNN's corporate representative and was asked to defend, which is an impossible position, because CNN's lawyers took one look at the clip and immediately issued an apology

to try to take advantage of the retraction statutes that give some protection to media if you offer a retraction. But then CNN decided, its legal team decided it wanted to defend the piece and claim it wasn't an error, it was tough but fair. Well, if it was tough but fair, why did you apologize? And so he was asked to defend this absolutely impossible position, which was on the one hand CNN issued an apology, but on the other hand they're not sorry. But I thought he was honest, I thought he was forthcoming. And, you know,

it was it's a tough position to be in. But, you know, some of the others. What did you think of what did you think of Alex Marquardt and his testimony, the reporter who caused all the trouble? You know, my opinion, he was not forthright. He speaks very well. You know, he's a star. He's a TV star. So he speaks very, very well. I mean, you're using that term very, very generously, Val, not forthright. He speaks very well. You know, he's a star. He's a TV star. So he speaks very, very well. I mean, you're using that term very, very generously, Val, but go ahead. He's CNN's chief national security reporter. So I thought he speaks well, but I thought under cross-examination, he kind of folded and he had he had an inability to kind of own his own words.

You show that theater trip clip, Megan, where he declares his own reporting theater. And in Cross, I kept asking him, so you included theater and he wouldn't say it. No, it's B-roll, it's this, it's pickup shots. And I eventually got to the point where I said to him, you just can't own your own words, can you? You just can't stomach the fact that you called this theater.

And he eventually came up with an excuse for it. He claimed that he was mimicking John Lovitz from SNL, who he claimed played this like master thespian who would say theater. And then during his direct, we were able to look up basically every SNL episode where the master thespian appeared and see that the line wasn't theater, it was acting. And so we were able to come back and expose that as a lie as well. And it just, I mean, his just veneer just shattered. And so I think he came across as not credible, as arrogant, as not a truth teller. The jury held him to account.

Here he is on the stand saying he was very proud of this defamatory report. You said you were proud of this one, did you not? Yes. You still proud, Mr. Markhardt? I am. Would you do another piece like this, Mr. Markhardt? I would. Would you like to apologize to Mr. Young, Mr. Marquardt? I don't feel I need to. Because he deserved to be nailed? No, because the story that we did was... Sir, because he deserved to be nailed? No, sir.

Because he was a mother effer? No, sir. Because he was an S-bag? Is there a question? Yes, sir. What is it? You don't want to apologize to him because you thought he was a S-H-I-T bag, correct? I don't feel the need to apologize to him. I didn't say that to her.

Correct or not? Correct. Because he is an a-hole? I don't feel the need to apologize. Because he has a punchable face? I don't feel the need to apologize. He's a parasite that needs to be exterminated, sir? None of these things were said to Mr. Young.

Your Honor, we have no further questions. Oh my God, this is such a disaster. I'm sorry. But like having tried cases, even even if this is a tactic, even if the tactic is we did nothing wrong. So I have nothing to apologize for. Yes, I there was some shit talk behind the scenes, but I didn't say to Mr. Young's face. You go in there hat in hand, hat in hand and say, this was dumb ass behind the scenes talk. You know, we actually at the time believed he was a bad guy. That's why we were talking like that. Now I realize we had it wrong. That's why we issued the correction. And I'm very sorry. That's really the only correct posture there. And then you could maybe say, but technically

the only thing that was wrong was black market, whatever their defense wound up being. And this was totally approached the wrong way in a testament to his arrogance and frankly, the arrogance of CNN, because any smart boss would have said, Alex, you're about to cost us millions of dollars, potentially a hundred million if they had gotten to punitive for the love of Christ. Try to look sorry. Okay. Sorry, Zach. So let's go back to the original problem. So you're, you're in Afghanistan and, and explain to me what you were doing because you were charging money to evacuate people. But as I understand it, the error was you weren't charging Afghans. The fees, in your view, were not exorbitant. And you were dealing with groups

like nongovernmental organizations, NGOs, saying, do you need my help in getting your people out? And those are the ones who are paying you, not some black market op. That's right. And it's an important distinction. I wasn't running any black market operations. I didn't break any laws. I was providing a very valuable service to companies that needed my help. And they were very happy to have a real option to get their people out of Afghanistan. CNN knew about that. They knew about Audible. They knew about Bloomberg. So they had the information. Those are companies that were using guys like you to get their people out

because Audible, like the podcast company, is that what you mean? They're not capable of sending in a former Navy SEAL to go get their people out of Afghanistan? These are large companies that have global access to former SEALs and former Delta Force operators. They have people all over the world. And at the time, I was one of very few that had a real option. So they were happy to be able to pay me to do this very important and very difficult job.

We learned through discovery that CNN never even bothered to try to contact Audible. Mr. Mark Hart on the stand explained that he just didn't think it made any sense that Audible would be interested in rescuing people from Afghanistan, but he didn't bother to try. He didn't even give him a call so he had this preconceived narrative for a story about afghans being exploited by predators uh presumably i had a punchable face so i i played the role of the villain for his for his fiction um and very very little of it was yeah his theater and they pointed to a few clips that were technically correct. He had screenshots of correspondents from me quoting prices. But the way that they laid it out in the clip made it look like I was charging Afghans these fees and made it sound like I was a criminal. So two pretty big errors that I don't think were covered up by the fact that they did accurately quote a few prices that I put out there. And again, just looking

through discovery from start to finish, the way that it was, it was about black markets and extortion from the beginning before they even had a story before the investigation. And that's just, that happens to be exactly where he ended up two weeks later before going to air. Two hours before I told him that a lot of the stuff he was about to say was not correct and I would need some time to provide thoughtful comment. He just ignored it and they went on the air. So how long did they give you to respond to this hit piece they were preparing on you? Under two hours, under two hours. And there were there were a lot of questions in there that would have required careful consideration, including my former affiliation with the Central Intelligence Agency.

I would have had to reach out to some people and get some guidance on how to answer that when confronted by a reporter. So he didn't pump the brakes. We can tell through discovery that he didn't want to pause the story. It wasn't hot news. It wasn't time sensitive. And he was upset that I wrote back. He said, when I actually responded to him, he said, effing young, just texted. So actually something like that. He said, yeah, he wrote for F sakes, effing young, just texted.

When you finally responded, you know, you're a news reporter and you're supposed to be trying to get information from your source, your source, the subject of your story writes back to you. And his immediate response to one of his colleagues is FFS, which he testified meant for F sake. Effing young just texted. I mean, he, he laid it, but he didn't use the euphemism. He used the straight up, you know, the curse words. He was not happy that Zach had reached back out to him. He, he didn't want to be bothered by you with your side of the story. He was too excited

to get you, which is what the texts reflect. We're going to get this MF-er. It was obviously a designed hit piece. So you testified on the air or at the trial that this had real effects on your life and your business. And it is a unique skill set. You know, I mean, I've interviewed Eric Prince. It's a, it's a unique skill set to know how to operate in this kind of theater safely and to do something as risky as evacuations. Um, I think that's why you charge money for it. And people like companies like Audible are willing to pay for it. But when that all went away as a result of this CNN report suggesting you're some sort of a dark force on the black market, taking advantage of hurting people. And here you are talking about what happened in your life. It's not 24. You're like a total failure. I've had some time now to try to recover. I've been in psychotherapy. I've't sleep. Still can't sleep.

Still have panic attacks. So they had to put me on stronger medication and put on stronger medicine for sleep and panic attacks. They all have side effects. I don't have the energy that I had before. It's affected our intimacy. Zach, can you explain how the CNN report caused that for you? It's hard to explain unless you've actually gone through it. You know, there was the professional damage that CNN caused, but that that was not nearly as severe as the impact that this has had on my family, my wife, my mom, not being able to tell them that things are going to be okay, that I can recover from this, that it's not as bad as it sounds.

Because, you know, as it turned out, it was a lot worse than I thought when I first saw the video. How so? What do you mean? Well, it's not good for anyone to be labeled a criminal all over the world on CNN. But for me, in particular, with my very, very small group of professionals, professional contacts, it's nuclear. It's radioactive. Eric Prince is another one of my contacts. And I wouldn't expect Eric to be able to or want to work with someone who has that label attached to them. You know, my contacts work for defense contractors. They work for governments. And they care about reputations.

They have human resources departments. So if they're bringing me forward for work or project, and someone Googles my name, prior to this outcome anyway, this is what they find. It's human trafficking, black market operator, and no company is going to take that risk and i wouldn't expect anyone to put their name next to mine and that that was the devastating impact that it had over over a three-year period um people used to come to me for important work and the outcome the immediate outcome of this this broadcast was no one would take my calls. That has improved somewhat since the lawsuit.

We have had some media, and I'm hoping that now that we have a jury verdict and my name has been officially and legally cleared and CNN has been exposed for making up lies about me, I'm hoping that that has some mitigating effect, but we'll see what the future holds. Can you comment on the fees that we showed in that report? They say they were exorbitant, $75,000 for evacuation by car, $.5 thousand per person to get to the UAE or Albania. Having absolutely no idea what it costs to evacuate somebody from Afghanistan, I have no context for those numbers. Neither did CNN, because we asked all of their

witnesses, more than a dozen, how much I should have charged, how much it should cost to evacuate someone from a failed state or a war zone. And nobody had any idea. And a few of them, including Mark Hart, said any amount of money would be too much as a matter of opinion, the term exorbitant, I can tell you in the world of defense contracting, 100 percent margin in a place like Afghanistan, even during the best of times, is not unusual at all. This is $75,000 for one vehicle, five to six passengers, Kabul to Peshawar. So it was for multiple people, just so the audience understands that wasn't for one person. Keep going, Zach. That's right. And it's misleading if you read it in a vacuum, you know, 75,000 for a vehicle. This isn't Uber. There's a lot of operational planning and work and precision that goes into

an emergency evacuation from a place like Afghanistan after the Taliban took over. So there was a lot baked into it. And I never had any issue sensitizing clients like Bloomberg and Audible with real security professionals working for them. They understood this. They came primarily from the special operations backgrounds. And it's something we didn't really need to discuss. They came primarily from the special operations backgrounds. And it's something we didn't really need to discuss. They got it. But when a CNN reporter sees the number 75,000 for transportation, they thought it seemed

excessive. And it was interesting. We learned through discovery, they got all of my pricing and all of my profits. I think it was about a 65% margin on average that I was charging clients who were happy to pay. CNN's margins are about 40% for what they do, just as a basis for comparison. Interesting. It's nowhere near as dangerous. No, not very dangerous. Creating fiction from your studio in Washington, D.C. But according to CNN, my prices were exorbitant. That was an interesting thing. Go ahead, Val.

Sorry. That was an interesting thing I thought that came out of trial. The reporters sort of exhibited this disgust for Zach because he had profited off of the situation in Afghanistan mind you he was charging corporations and NGOs who were happy to pay for this service and had no qualms about it everyone was happy the corporation was happy Zach was happy the people rescued rescued from Afghanistan were happy but CNN decided that their reporters that this was disgusting and this was horrible and Zach deserved punishment for it and at trial we kind of brought out

This hypocrisy which is you some of you all including mark art our war correspondents, right? You go into war you're paid to report in war CNN Advertises its own advertisements and sells advertisements while it's reporting on war both CNN's reporters and Zachary young were paid by while it's reporting on war. Both CNN's reporters and Zachary Young were paid by corporations to operate in war zones. No one's saying that what CNN is doing is inappropriate to report on war, and no one should be saying that servicing corporations to evacuate people from war zones is a problem either.

And yet CNN turned, it was just so hypocritical, just turned this like hatred on Zach as a result of what he was doing. And I think that really appealed to the jury, this idea that, you know, they were hating him, they were going after him, they were maliciously targeting him. And this was one of the reasons why, and it was completely hypocritical. I mean, it's so crazy because I think about, you know, even my own show, if I had a correspondent who was over in Afghanistan and let's say it's not a war correspondent, it's somebody there who's just reporting on international

relations and this happens and I need to get him out. I, it's my responsibility as the company owner to get him out. I'd be thrilled to have an option like Zachary, like great. I have, I would have no idea where to even begin. I'm not going over there. I'm not qualified for this. So I need to hire somebody who's got a background that's appropriate that he knows what he's doing, was in the Navy, was in the CIA, knows the region, knows how to do risky ops to rescue $500. That's obvious. I'm not, you know, I think it's, it had to be a political agenda or maybe Maureen Callahan was on the show when this verdict broke. And I think she was the one suggesting, boy, they gave Joe Biden a bigger pass on this disastrous operation than they did you at CNN. Like maybe it's transferred anger. You know, it's easier to blame you as doing something wrong than their, their leader who they didn't want to criticize. I don't know what the motivation was. Uh, but I mean, the jury didn't seem to care. They thought it was personal. And I think on that, they were right. Stand by. Cause I want to, I want to, um, tell

the audience what has happened to Alex Marquardt since this happened, since this whole dispute arose, and we'll ask Zachary to give us a feel for how much he got. honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today. You can catch The Megyn Kelly Show on Triumph, a SiriusXM channel featuring lots of hosts you may know and probably love. Great people like Dr. Laura, I'm back, Nancy Grace, Dave Ramsey, and yours truly, Megyn Kelly.

You can stream The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM at home or anywhere you are. No car required. I do it all the time. I love the Sirius XM app. It has ad free music coverage of every major sport comedy talk podcast and more. Subscribe now. Get your first three months for free. Go to SiriusXM.com slash MK show to subscribe and get three months free. That's SiriusXM.com slash MK show and get three months free. Offer details apply. So right now, your credibility with me, Mr. Axelrod, is about none, if you understand that. I do. I certainly do, and I apologize to you for that.

Let me say this. I mean, y'all made a lawyer like that in Philly or New York or D.C. or wherever the heck it is or Miami. We don't worry like this around here. That was the judge in Zach's trial against CNN laying into CNN's lawyer, who also happens to be named David Axelrod. It's not the David Axelrod you know from their commentating. Vel, why was the judge so mad at CNN in that clip? Sure. So a couple days earlier, CNN had asked Zach a question and sprang a surprise document on us. That's, as you know, Megan, that's not supposed to happen in litigation. Both sides, it's not trial by ambush.

We're supposed to disclose things to the other side and you have a due process right to prepare. They obtained this document. We didn't know that they had it. And it purported to be this consulting agreement between Zach and another company. And they were using it as this bombshell evidence that Zach lied and he did have people that gave him work after the segment aired. And we immediately objected, because we've never seen this document before. And we went to sidebar with the judge. And Mr. Axrod told the judge that this had,

I don't remember his exact words, but something along the lines of this, like by sheer luck, we obtained this document. And it just kind of landed in our lap. And, you know, it's so crucial to the case. We have to be able to use it. And the judge allowed them to use it, notwithstanding that it wasn't disclosed and didn't allow us to consult with Zach before it was used. And when he was confronted with Zach was confronted with it, he explained it perfectly. And he said, listen, this is not a commercial agreement. This is simply an agreement to hold my security clearance. I've never done any work for this company you have seven years of my bank records you've got all of my tax returns you see no income has come this is just an arrangement to hold a security clearance because that's the way it works when you leave the government a

corporation has to hold your clearance a couple days later the ceo of that company wrote to us he told us that essentially cnn had lied to us and that it didn't fortuitously or by luck come into their hands but they had issued a subpoena to that company they had not told anyone that issued a subpoena they had obtained the documents they had made a partial production of them using only one of the documents turns out in that correspondence this company informed informed CNN that Zach no longer had a security clearance as of 2022, something we didn't even know anymore. Then CNN, knowing that, put an expert on the stand to testify that because he had a security

clearance, he could still get more work. It wasn't a problem. They knew he didn't have one. We didn't. What? Yeah. When we found all this information out, we filed a motion with the judge and we said, look, we've been massively prejudiced here. And we were very careful not to ask for any kind of sanctions or anything like that.

We asked for one thing. We said, can we get the CEO to testify? Because technically we didn't notify him, but they got this document surreptitiously. They didn't tell us they got it. They told you yesterday that it fell in their lap based on basically luck that wasn't true. And, you know, when a judge believes that a lawyer, which we call like an officer of the court, you have duties of candor and ethical obligations not to lie. People like saying lawyers are liars, but we're not. You're not supposed to.

You have to be very honest. Not in court. Yeah. And, you know, when a judge believes that he's been lied to, that's the reaction you get. And, you know, I think Judge Henry very reasonably believed, we believed it too, that he had been lied to. And he flew off the handle saying, you know, you just lied to you. You misrepresented to me where this document came from, how you got it. You know, you accused Mr. Young of lying in his deposition. He didn't. You accused him of lying, committing a fraud in the court. He didn't. He answered every question honestly, including when you surprised him. He says, did you sign this document with this and this company? Zach said, yeah, I did. Then he went to impeach him, which Megan, you know this, but I'm not sure the audience is. Be proper. Yeah, you can't impeach a witness if they tell you the truth. There's nothing to impeach

with. It was Judge Henry flew off the handle at CNN's lawyer, basically feeling that he had lied to him. And that's why he said to him, look, your credibility with me is about zero. Wow. Wow. That's stunning. I did not know all that. So, Zach, let me ask you this. Was there any point during the trial? Because I realize, you know, you it sounds like you had the opportunity to settle this before you went to trial. You didn't, you wanted to make a point. Was there a point during the trial at which you could have settled it? Like, because there's risk, you know, while you're, you're not, you're not a hundred percent sure as the plaintiff or the defendant, how the jury is going to come back a jury of six in Florida. You liked your chances

in this particular jurisdiction, um, which was-leaning and probably not full of a ton of CNN lovers. But OK, fine. I'm sure they would have found in CNN's favor if the evidence so showed. So did you consider settling during the course of the trial? No, I didn't. And, you know, Bell reminded me frequently throughout the trial that that was always an option, that CNN was ready to talk. But as I mentioned earlier, that that wasn't my motivation for doing this for the last three years. I really wanted to expose what happened. I didn't want CNN to be able to just sweep it under the rug with a settlement and an NDA and never be held accountable.

So I wanted to take it to the jury for a decision. And that's what we got. It wasn't without risk. Juries are notoriously impossible to predict. But that was a risk that I was willing to take and that Vell was supportive of. And I think a lot of lawyers probably wouldn't have been. You know, he invested three years of his time and his firm's time, not just him, but we had probably about nine attorneys on the case. So the amount of work that was put into this over a three-year period is astonishing. So Veld always had my back and was comfortable taking it to the very end. So it was the perfect combination for us.

And I'm very happy with the outcome. And I'm also relieved that we don't have to spend two more years in appeal. Yes, of course. So when the jury stood up, because you're always on pins and needles when you're waiting on a jury, it's the worst feeling. It's just terrible. They call you back in there with a verdict. So you stand up to hear the verdict, I assume, or you're sitting there. And when they said that they found CNN liable and they were awarding you $5 million, what was that like? I wasn't surprised. I mean, just looking at the facts, I don't know how they could have come to any other conclusion about defamation per se, defamation by implication, and malice. I don't know how you could show more actual and express malice. So I wasn't surprised with the outcome at all.

But, you know, it's definitely been very taxing going through this process for three years, going through the trial. And I knew that CNN, you know, I felt like they probably had enough. And I hoped that they had learned their lesson. Now that I've had some time to reflect over the past two days, I'm not sure they did. When I saw the statement that they made, that they still stand behind their brave journalists. When I consider the fact that Alexander Markhardt was promoted to chief national security correspondenceents during this lawsuit promoted, if that's how they handle, you know, making a mistake of this magnitude, I can't, I can't say that they learned any mistake from it. But at least I feel like I've done my part to expose it. I know Veld did his part. And, you know, what happens from this point on is really up to the media. And if they want to

do the right thing and take an honest look in the mirror and realize that there is room for improvement, that this isn't something that should happen ever to anyone, whether it's to a politician or a normal person like me, it's not something that should ever happen. And it doesn't need to. So I hope that that's the outcome that it has. But our progress is done in this. Val, how were you able to sue in Florida? CNN's based in Atlanta, and it sounds like Zach was overseas. How'd you get this case in Florida? Yeah, well, you can sue anywhere the defamation is published into, any county it's been published into.

So CNN has been published into Florida. Also, CNN has affiliates in Bay County, which allow for venue in Bay County as well. And Zach's business, which was an original plaintiff, was incorporated in Florida. So we had a few nexus to Florida. That's why we brought it there. By the way, I wanted to comment on one thing. If I remember correctly, and I think I do. The jury was 50 50 50% Republican and 50% Democrat. So this wasn't like a, yeah, it didn't pull. Judge Henry was very liberal, in my opinion,

of granting strikes for cause to CNN for anyone that kind of expressed skepticism over CNN or media. They ended up with a very fair jury. You're out, sir. You should have seen the hands that came up, Megan, when they said, when CNN's lawyers asked that, who here thinks CNN's fake news? And I mean, oh my God, so many hands. They did it to themselves. They did it to themselves.

That same jury eight years ago would not have done that. CNN did that to themselves and I watched it happen. Um, so me, Val, what happened with the punitive damages? Where were you on that? Because had they already said, and he's entitled to punitive damages, and now we will deliberate the number? That's right. So in Florida, it's this unique process where you break the trial into two phases. CNN has a right to do this and they exercise it. It's called bifurcation. And so in phase one of the trial, the jury determines, are you liable for defamation per se and by implication? They said yes. How much money do you owe because of that? And they said five million.

And then are you entitled to punitive damages? Does CNN need to be punished? And they answered that question, yes. So that's phase one. They said liable for defamation, pay him $5 million and we're going to punish you, which then means we roll into a phase two where it then becomes, well, what is a proper punishment for CNN? And to do that, you need to understand how much CNN is worth, right? Because if you give Bill Gates a $10 speeding ticket, he's not going to learn his lesson. He'll just speed through the rest of worth, right? Because if you give Bill Gates a $10 speeding ticket,

he's not going to learn his lesson. He'll just speed through the rest of town, right? And you need to impose an actual punishment. And one of the phrases we were looking for was, you know, like, in order to make a difference, you got to make a dent. And this is a behemoth company. I mean, like, as phase two progressed, the evidence came out that CNN makes $2 billion

in revenue a year, right? I mean, this company is worth a lot of money, brings in a lot of money. It is on a decline, but it's still bringing in a lot of money. And how do you punish someone who's worth a billion dollars or is bringing in $2 billion worth of revenue per year? And so phase two began us presenting evidence of how much CNN is worth and how much they could afford to pay without bankrupting them but punishing them. And I think our expert ended up saying they bring in about $5 million in revenue a day,

a proper mode of punishment is to kind of put somebody in timeout where they no longer – you dock their pay so to speak. And I think the question from us that happened shortly before settlement was reached was, you know, could they afford a month timeout? You know, about 30 days of revenue at $5 million a day, which is about $150 million. And the expert said, yeah, no problem. And so I think, you know, that was the phase that was going on. And then had it continued, we would have eventually gotten in front of the jury and said, this is how much we think you need to pay to punish, you know, to make CNN be punished for their conduct and to deter anyone else from doing something similar. We never got there. And didn't they, it made news that

somebody from CNN testified, or maybe it was your expert, about the, just the downward spiral of revenues that CNN is facing now, which was kind of interesting. Do you remember what that was, Val? Yeah, I think it was like 400 million downs in the last couple of years or something like that. It was our punitive damages expert who was tracking their revenue from 2020, I think it was 2021, 22 and 23 and showed, you know, a drop in income. He did explain, though, that even though they are steadily losing money, they still can't afford to pay a significant amount of money. Oh, yeah.

Well, maybe they'll go up now that they've moved Jim Acosta to midnight. I will have to wait to see whether that makes sense. You didn't show that clip, but Jim Acosta aired the segment at issue in the case and talked about black markets before. There were these teaser trailers. One of the issues in the case was what are the gist? Forget about what the actual words are. When you watch the whole thing, what's the impression you walk away from?

And one of the things we used to prove the gist were these teasers that they would play before the video aired. And it was said stuff like, you know, how desperate Afghans are being preyed upon, you know, being demanded to, they pay big time to get out. And we said, what's better to summarize what this is about than their own teaser trailers? And Jim Acosta gave one of those teasers and then played the segment. So he was featured in our case.

I mean, as I will tell you, as having been an anchor in cable news for a long time, in this case, I don't blame Jim Acosta. I really, I don't know, maybe you disagree, or I don't blame Jake Tapper either, because there's no way they wrote the intro scripts tossing to Alex Marcotte. Normally the way that would work is the field reporter would come up with a report and the editors and the producers back at home base would say, what is the story? And then the writer on the show would write the intro. The executive producer would approve it. Sometimes if the anchor has time, they'll just edit it for voice. But you're not really doing the reporting as the anchor at the

anchor desk in that instance. It's the field reporter and the producers at your network that you are relying on. And that's why it's so egregious that they promoted that guy, that they, knowing you, because you filed your lawsuit before they promoted him in, he was promoted in September of 2023, right, Val? They well knew by that point that he had gotten them in this trouble. It's worse. That promotion happened shortly after we filed our motion for leave to add punitive damages. But I agree with you, meaning we did not depose Jake Tapper until the punitive damages section of the case that talked about how much revenue the Jake Tapper show brought in and things like that.

Because for the same reason you just laid out, we don't really think Jake Tapper had anything to do with the defamation. He was tagged in a lot of the media coverage, but this was an alex markhart and other story tapper was the anchor he was handed a script you know he read his script that he thought was vetted properly and so he ended up making some of the most damning statements but i think zach agrees with me that you know we don't blame jake tapper for what occurred but for markhart um his contract negotiations came up and we actually – CNN moved what we call a motion to eliminate, to keep this out of the case and they were successful over our objection. So what happened is we filed our motion for leave to amend to add punitive damages which

is essentially a motion where we take all the bad evidence of the case, we put it in front of the court and we say, this is really, really, really bad conduct. You should allow us to seek punitive damages, punish CNN. And the court acts as a gatekeeper to say, yes, this is really bad. We'll let you see if you can get it from the jury or no, this isn't bad enough. You're not going to let the jury take it. And as soon as they got that motion within a few weeks or a month, they paused Alex Marquardt's contract negotiations, conducted an investigation for about a month, and then ended that investigation by promoting him and giving him a raise.

And we said, what is better proof that a company needs to be punished than the fact that they are rewarding these wrongdoers as opposed to, right? But the judge kept it out. He said, it's too prejudicial. I'm not going to lie. Wow. Wow. Wow. Okay. So in the midst of this damage experts saying 120 million, that might do it. CNN, I imagine, knocked on your door again and said, can we please put this to bed and spare Zachary the pain of two more years of this matter in an appellate court, et cetera, et cetera.

And so finally, Zach, you decided to settle the case. I know that the number is confidential, but how can you describe it to us? As you said, it's confidential, but I feel like I've been vindicated. We got the jury verdict. We accomplished everything that we wanted to accomplish. And I didn't see the point of dragging it along for two more years in appeal. I felt like we had already achieved victory. And I really was looking forward to just getting on with my life. Let me ask you this. Technically, that night, did you have a McDonald's quarter pounder and cheese?

Did you have a real filet and a nice steak, or did you go for the full surf and turf? It was actually a filet from the hotel, probably the same thing that I had for most nights that I was there. Limited option. I slept a lot better good you do do you do you sleep better that do you really that's good i i do uh the last few nights especially um didn't sleep much during the trial but i mean not as little as vel he was pulling all nighters several nights uh out of the two- period. I don't know how he did is. The depositions, it's so combative, a real adversary. I mean, I don't compare what we do to like military guys like

you, Zach, but like there's a real adversary standing up there trying to convince the judge you're an idiot. And he really is out to get you and undermine you and make you look stupid. You have to be ready for everything. I don't know. In the same way, like some of these adrenaline junkies wind up losing their adrenal gland. It's got to happen to some lawyers too, Val. I agree. I agree. Yeah. I tell Zach, it's the closest civilians like us, like me, will ever get to war because I don't have the guts to do what he did. And, you know, can't thank you enough for that service, Zach. But like, you know, that's the closest we get to these boardroom wars. But yeah, you're right. I mean, there's and it's not just the other guy, right? There's a team of lawyers behind the scenes working to make you

look like an idiot. And you've got your team working to make you not look like an idiot. And that's really what ends up, you know, coming forth. It's a battle of wish. It was interesting to watch, but I wouldn't want to do it again. A question about the difference between digital and TV. Is there is that explained? Like, I don't understand. Maybe you can shed some light on why CNN thinks apparently, according to these notes, it might be OK to air this Swiss cheese full of holes report on their television network, but not on dot com. Yeah, it was odd to us, too. I mean, there's some additional language about, oh, on TV, it was like silhouetted figures and it zips along.

And they tried explaining in a trial saying, well, there's more space on digital, so it's got to have more content. But when you look at the actual red lines of what they created versus the TV script, it's really basically the same. In fact, Tom Lumley characterized it as a slight recast off of the digital segment. So my feelings are with yours, Megan. I don't understand how they think that there's a difference in standards, that they can kind of do something on TV that's substandard, but then when they put it in print, it's got

to be better. And we use that extensively to show that the video segment itself and the digital article were both you know had more holes than switch cheese or 20 emotion 80 emotion 20 obscured fact and we asked thomas lumley on the stand i said to him what is an obscured fact other than a lie right and and his response was like, you know, he couldn't, he couldn't respond. So yeah, I'm with you guys. Like, uh, why didn't we settle? Why are we, why am I here? So Zach, now what? Now you say that people are like, you didn't work, you didn't work for a couple of years. So now you've gotten a settlement and you've gotten your name cleared. Do you think you can go back to doing what, I mean, not the Afghan evacuations that's that's over, but like, what's next for you?

I'm hoping that I can recover from it professionally. I've had a lot of outreach the last few days, especially people, former colleagues that I haven't heard from in many years, three years to be exact, that had watched the trial and are aware of the outcome. So I'm hoping that I can get back to doing what I, what I like to do. But it's, it's still too early to tell. It's only been a week. You're going to hang with your dog. I understand you've got a dog named Misha who you love. I do. I spend a lot of time with Misha. We went on a long rollerblading around the city today, this morning.

So where do you live? In Vienna, Austria. Very nice. That's a good life choice. And your wife, too? She's still with you? Are you guys okay? She's still with me.

She's been through all of this with me. So she's very happy to have it over with. And we're still trying to figure out what life is going to look like after this. Good, good. Well, I have something to say. I think that no matter what CNN says outwardly, I guarantee you inside the company, this was a holy shit moment. And I bet you they did do some revision of their protocols. And maybe another chat with their reporters about

what's okay to express in a text and what's not. But it would just be human instinct to try to shore up your reporting and be like super careful after something like this. So even though they're not saying it publicly, Zach, I bet you they're doing it and that's because of you. So good luck to you. Thank you. Congratulations to both of you. And thanks for telling your story here. Thank you. Thank you for having us.

All the best. Wow. What a story. Gosh, it's just so, you know, I meant what I said at the beginning. I don't take delight in seeing another news organization be found liable for defamation. It's, you know, it's thin ice for any journalist because we're in the business of reporting on other people. That's our business. And what business never makes a mistake? What business gets it right? 100% of the time, right? So it's like, but the law protects us in a lot of ways, like the standard to prove defamation against a news organization is high. And in nine times out of 10 cases, if you screw something up and someone's angry with you over your report, they will come to you and ask you for a correction and say, here's what you got wrong. So you actually, in like a lot of, unlike a doctor who cuts out the wrong organ, in journalism, you usually do have the chance to cure,

which is such a privilege, right? So like you got a second bite at the apple to go back and say, did I F it up? Let's check with my people. Let's make sure we didn't do this guy wrong. And at that point, if you choose to stand by the story, you own it. You own whatever comes. I mean, really at the first instance, but really at that second point. And it's such a weird set of circumstances where CNN winds up giving this half-hearted apology, which obviously was insincere. And then by the time they get to trial saying, we didn't mean a word of that. We're not apologetic. He does have a punchable face. How did anyone think that was going to work? I don't know. Good for that guy. I hope he rebuilds his life. Thank you all for listening. What a week this was. Have a great weekend and

we'll see you Monday. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.